markrowlandsauthor.com

Mark Rowlands

I am a writer and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami.

I took what one might call a ‘Wittgensteinian’ route into philosophy: engineering at the University of Manchester followed, after a year of abject failure (to pass exams, attend class, even get out of bed most mornings) by a switch to the far more worthwhile business of philosophy. I then went ‘up’ to Oxford to do a Ph.D. – or ‘D.Phil.’ as they call it there. I can’t really remember what my thesis was on, but I’m sure it was very good. Then, I walked the earth for the next couple of decades – decades that encompassed life in the U.S., Ireland, Britain and France. In the U.S., I was invited to far too many good parties and generally had far too much fun. To arrest my moral and intellectual deterioration, I then moved to Ireland, where I shut myself away in a little house in the country, and wrote lots of books. I also flirted with the idea of becoming a professional surfer – an idea I eventually had to abandon on the grounds that I really wasn’t very good at it. England was uneventful; France was the usual mix of triumph and disaster. I’m now back in the U.S.

If any of this biographical information sounds remotely interesting – and I assure you it really isn’t – then you might want to check out my autobiography (click here to see an early draft of the first chapter) which was published by Granta in 2008. I like to refer to the project as my ‘autobiography’ since it makes me sound terribly important. It’s actually the story of a decade or so of my life I spent living, in the aforementioned countries, with a wolf. The wolf is the star – I’m just an insignificant extra bumbling around in the background.

 

Published Work

Broadly speaking, my published work divides up into three categories. The first category comprises work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Here I’m known, or so Wikipedia tells me, as one of the architects of a view known variously as the extended mind, vehicle externalism, locational externalism, active externalism, architecturalism and environmentalism. The idea, very roughly, is that at least some mental processes extend into the subject’s environment in that they are composed, partly (and, on most versions, contingently), of manipulative, exploitative, and transformative operations performed by that subject on suitable environmental structures. I think I’m also known for holding a rather strange view of the nature of consciousness.

The second category comprises work in applied ethics, in particular concerning the moral status of non-human animals and the natural environment. Here I’m known primarily for developing the idea that the moral claims of animals can be understood in terms of a contractarian or contractualist moral theory of a broadly Rawlsian sort.

Finally, in the third category, I have devoted a not inconsiderable amount of time to trying to convince the general public of the wonders of philosophy.

You can probably work out which book is which …